The Third Kind of Data On Facebook is Predictive and Hidden

News. In both hearings before the US Senate and Congress, Facebook CEO and founder, Mark Zuckerberg only mentioned two kinds of data: information that people decide to share on the platform, and data that is automatically collected about people’s behaviour, according to Privacy International.But there’s a third kind of data: data that is derived, inferred, or predicted from the data that people share and that is recorded about their behaviour.

This third type of data can reveal shockingly invasive insights. Such insights can be generated when data on millions of people are analysed. This is exactly the kind of data that Facebook doesn’t like to mention — and that is also strikingly absent from the user notification we received.

One tool that seeks to allow users to better understand personality prediction was “ApplyMagicSauce” which was also developed at the University of Cambridge, writes Privacy International:

The app asked for data like our public profile, pages we liked, date of birth and current city. The app then used that data to predict a huge range of details: gender, sexual orientation, political leaning, their intelligence, and also their personality profile.

At DataEthics.eu we have used this tool to teach about data predictions for years. Try it yourself here: applymagicsauce.com. Unfortunately the Facebook Connect part is ‘temporarily out of service’ but you can try with your Twitter profile or copy/paste a text of yours into it.